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Sing on, sing on, my bonny bird
Dec. 27th, 2018 04:28 pmA hawk came to my birdfeeder today. I was sitting in my bedroom, braiding my hair and ready to go for a run, and there it was out on the deck railing outside my window, where I'd expected to see mourning doves. I looked at its feet, then up its belly, up and up like a shot in a movie when you realize the goon standing over you is a lot bigger than you expected. It saw me with its bright orange eyes, turned its head to glare at me with its right eye, then took off. I wish I'd had a longer look at its feathers, but I think it was a Cooper's hawk; the pattern of light brown dots in lines across its front was about right. I'm trying to get out of the habit of calling everything a red-tailed hawk, even though that's a safe bet around here.
My usual clients, mourning doves and sparrows with the occasional cardinal, only stayed away for a few hours. As the sun set this afternoon, they were mobbing the feeder again and seemed unfazed (though birds don't have much facial expression). I wonder if I could set out an equivalent of owl decoys, ones which will only frighten raptors and not seed-eating birds.
Hawk thoughts have led me to "The Gay Goshawk," of which a typo-riddled version can be found here. I should find a good tune and learn it. There aren't enough ballads that have an unqualified happy ending, and it has a clever lover and a singing goshawk, too. In Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, she points out that people often say they've seen a goshawk when they've actually seen a sparrowhawk, because the only obvious difference is size, and any hawk eating a pigeon on your front lawn will look enormous, "like someone's tipped a snow leopard into your kitchen and you find it eating the cat." The hawk this morning looked huge and menacing and was obviously looking for my birds as food, not friends. The two bald eagles I saw on Christmas Day, in Western Massachusetts, were a lot bigger, but they weren't sitting on my front railing like an aberration in reality.
Here's a girl-and-eagle song: "See Her Fly Home," by Nancy Kerr. I've never seen Kerr discuss or write about the song, but it has to have been inspired by the documentary "The Eagle Huntress" about the Kazakh Mongolian teenage eagler, Aisholpan Nurgaiv. (Not to detract from her achievements, but I also understand that Aisholpan isn't an isolated prodigy, and that there are similar Kazakh and other ethnic Mongolian eagler girls and women out there too.)
My usual clients, mourning doves and sparrows with the occasional cardinal, only stayed away for a few hours. As the sun set this afternoon, they were mobbing the feeder again and seemed unfazed (though birds don't have much facial expression). I wonder if I could set out an equivalent of owl decoys, ones which will only frighten raptors and not seed-eating birds.
Hawk thoughts have led me to "The Gay Goshawk," of which a typo-riddled version can be found here. I should find a good tune and learn it. There aren't enough ballads that have an unqualified happy ending, and it has a clever lover and a singing goshawk, too. In Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, she points out that people often say they've seen a goshawk when they've actually seen a sparrowhawk, because the only obvious difference is size, and any hawk eating a pigeon on your front lawn will look enormous, "like someone's tipped a snow leopard into your kitchen and you find it eating the cat." The hawk this morning looked huge and menacing and was obviously looking for my birds as food, not friends. The two bald eagles I saw on Christmas Day, in Western Massachusetts, were a lot bigger, but they weren't sitting on my front railing like an aberration in reality.
Here's a girl-and-eagle song: "See Her Fly Home," by Nancy Kerr. I've never seen Kerr discuss or write about the song, but it has to have been inspired by the documentary "The Eagle Huntress" about the Kazakh Mongolian teenage eagler, Aisholpan Nurgaiv. (Not to detract from her achievements, but I also understand that Aisholpan isn't an isolated prodigy, and that there are similar Kazakh and other ethnic Mongolian eagler girls and women out there too.)
